** Edition of 150 ** Actionreaction 2 is the latest instalment in an ongoing experiment at the fault line between abstract painting and free improvisation. Conceived by New York‑born painter and designer Pippo Lionni and realised in close collaboration with Italian musicians Sergio Corbini (piano, synthesizer, electronics) and Stefano Franceschini (soprano and baritone saxophone, electronics), the project treats the act of painting as both visual composition and live instrument. Across 12 pieces on 2 CDs, the trio explore a volatile spectrum that runs from free jazz and prog‑rock inflected soundscapes to avant‑garde electronic drift, using the physical noise of paint hitting canvas as a third voice in the conversation.
The working setup is deceptively simple. On the studio floor, Lionni lays out large canvases and attacks them with spackle knives, rollers and brushes, moving across the surface in sweeping, choreographic gestures. Every drag, scrape and impact produces sound: the grain of roller on primed fabric, the slap of a loaded brush, the metallic rasp of a knife edge. Corbini and Franceschini treat this as a live, unpredictable percussion section, listening as intently to Lionni’s mark‑making as to each other’s instruments. Piano clusters and saxophone lines are not laid “over” the painting process; they hook into it, echo it, push against its rhythms. Electronics – from synth swells to processed sax and piano – expand the palette further, sometimes smearing the acoustic events into noise, sometimes isolating tiny details in frozen time.
This circular influence is at the heart of Actionreaction 2. The painting has an audio form at the exact moment it is being created, and the music has a visual effect in the way it shapes Lionni’s movement and choices. Composition here is not a pre‑written score but a feedback system: the sounds of brushes and knives suggest a tempo or texture; Corbini and Franceschini respond; Lionni, in turn, adjusts the force, speed or direction of his strokes. Over the course of each piece, the three build and dismantle structures in real time – swells where baritone sax roars over piano low‑end and dense scraping, then sudden drop‑outs into near‑silence where only a single, thin brush noise and a distant electronic tone remain. On AR14, bassist Silvia Bolognesi joins, adding another physical, low‑frequency presence that thickens the interplay and anchors some of the wilder flights.
Actionreaction 2 also sits within Lionni’s broader trajectory. Born in New York in 1954, he began painting as a teenager, studied at the High School of Music and Art and pursued philosophy and science before relocating to France in 1981 to work in design, graphics and teaching. In 1998 he developed the pictogram language Facts of Life across books, prints, installations and films, and in 2008 turned decisively back to abstract painting. Movement, form and collaboration with contemporary musicians have been constants. In 2016 he worked with composer Qasim Naqvi on the exhibition Chronology 20160421 / 41° -74° at Gallery P! in New York, a project that further crystallised his interest in time‑based media and sound. Out of this came the “Action‑reaction” group in Italy, a laboratory dedicated to exploring interactive improvisational exchange between abstract painting and sound – a practice in which the painter’s trance‑like traversal of the canvas leaves not just visible traces but an audible trail.
Lionni now divides his time between studios in France, Italy and Sweden, with exhibitions and performances at institutions such as the Brownstone Foundation and Galerie Frédéric Giroux in Paris, Casa dell’Ambiente in Siena, P! Gallery in New York and Dutko Galerie in Paris. Actionreaction 2 carries that gallery‑performance energy into recorded form without flattening it. You can hear the room – the distance between canvas and microphone, the air around the sax, the mechanical click of pedal switches – and you can almost see the painter’s path in the way textures thicken and thin. For listeners, the album offers two parallel experiences at once: a demanding but rewarding journey through free‑form sound, and a kind of invisible painting session unfolding in the mind’s eye, where every scrape and chord suggests another mark being made.
